Yesterday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul withdrew her proposal to amend the state's vehicle and traffic laws, effectively shelving any near-term path for commercial robotaxi services outside New York City. The plan would have opened the door for companies like Waymo — which already provides over 400,000 paid rides per week across six US cities — to expand into the state. But legislative support simply wasn't there.
This isn't a story about technology that doesn't work. Waymo's robotaxis operate daily in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and Miami. The technology has arrived. What hasn't arrived is a way for regulators, legislators, and the public to independently verify that these systems are operating safely. And that's the gap that keeps killing proposals like this one.
The trust deficit
Look at the safeguards Hochul's proposal included: a $1 million application fee, $5 million in financial security, approval from the state transportation commissioner, and a ban on deployment in cities over a million people. These are reasonable guardrails. But they're all before-the-fact requirements — financial barriers and bureaucratic checkpoints. None of them answer the question legislators actually care about: what is this vehicle doing, moment to moment, on our roads?
Right now, the answer to that question lives inside the AV companies themselves. Operational data — sensor readings, AI decision-making, speed, routing, near-miss events — is captured by proprietary systems, stored on company servers, and shared at the company's discretion. Regulators are asked to trust, not verify. And as New York just demonstrated, that's not enough.
This isn't unique to robotaxis, either. Autonomous mobile robots are being deployed in warehouses, on university campuses, in hospitals, and across factory floors. The same trust deficit exists everywhere autonomous systems operate alongside people.
What we're building
PhyWare is a data platform for autonomous systems, and we're building it specifically to close this gap.
The core idea is straightforward: every autonomous system should have a verifiable record of what it did, when, and why — like a flight recorder for robots. We're starting with two products:
PhyTrace is a lightweight telemetry agent that captures comprehensive operational data directly from the robot — sensors, speed, location, AI reasoning, battery state, everything available — and streams it in real time. PhyCloud stores that data immutably with cryptographic provenance, meaning every data point is tamper-evident and traceable back to its source. No one — not the operator, not us — can alter the record after the fact.
Together, they create a trusted, independently verifiable audit trail for any autonomous system.
Back to New York
Imagine the conversation New York legislators could have had if every robotaxi ride generated a cryptographically signed, tamper-evident record of the vehicle's behavior — independently verifiable by any regulator, auditor, or safety agency. The debate shifts from "should we allow this?" to "here's the operational evidence — let's look at the data."
That's the world we're building toward. Not just for robotaxis, but for every autonomous system that operates in the physical world alongside people.
Follow along
PhyWare is in active development. If you're an operator, OEM, or integrator working with autonomous systems and the trust problem resonates, we'd love to hear from you.